Chicago in office portraits

… And we like what we see.

The anniversary everyone is trying to avoid talking about right now is how we’re at the COVID-19 pandemic’s five year mark. When I’m asked how this time five years ago affected me and my business I think of two stories to tell.

The first is a shoot we did for a prominent leader at the Art Institute. Public places including the Art Institute were closed and the streets were deserted. It took me only 18 minutes to drive there from Logan Square. And when we got there, we had the entire museum to ourselves. Walking around a space that gets 1.3 million visitors a year and being the only few people roaming through the quiet halls and galleries was a beautifully surreal experience I will never forget. I drove home beaming with gratitude.

The second story starts the same way, but ends much differently. I photographed an architect in their large office space usually filled with at least 100 workers, but instead it sat dark and empty. We turned on the lights to set up for some portraits, and it was like looking at a building in Chernobyl, fresh after the disaster. Blueprints and carpet samples were strewn over conference tables, cubicles hosting family photos in frames, favorite coffee mugs, and the occasional sweater still on the back of a chair gave an eerie feeling of loss. I rolled my cart of gear through empty streets back to the parking garage, loaded it in my car, then sat in the driver’s seat and cried.

Luckily the streets are packed again, and Chicago’s Loop is still a global destination for tourists, residents, and businesses. But like all major cities, the shift from office work to remote work in most professional industries has led Chicago businesses to scale down their square footage of rented space. Fewer office workers also means fewer retail businesses for them to patronize, and vacancy rates in commercial spaces are still at an all-time high compared to pre-pandemic times.

What does that have to do with photography? As a commercial photo studio in Chicago with headshot and portrait clients in the Loop, we’ve been into just about every highrise in the city (and every parking garage, so we can tell you exactly which ones don’t have ramps, but I digress). Something we’ve noticed since the pandemic began is that office buildings are working their butts off to attract tenants. And it’s paying off.

Every major downtown building has wrapped or is currently wrapping major renovations to add fitness centers, restaurants, co-working spaces, and our personal favorite: the work lounge. Many buildings now even have several modern, sleek, beautiful communal spaces and conferencing facilities for events and coworking that ARE SO AWESOME FOR PHOTOS. Sorry to shout, I’m just really excited about it.

For years, we have been going into bland office suites and boring conference rooms to photograph execs and would do our best to add lighting, depth, and take the photos at just the right angles to make the rooms look more awesome than they were.

But damn, man. In the last five years, office interior design has been a game changer. These new gorgeous spaces do all the work for us on our photoshoots. Check out these photos just taken during an executive portrait session at 1 E. Wacker, for example.